Most people, if not all, watching the Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin rematch would say that the bout was exceedingly close in terms of action and in the final scorecards.
But at the time the official scores were read, few can imagine how close it truly was. A look at the fight stats from CompuBox gives a pretty good idea of that.
From the onset, the total number of punches landed by each fight are somewhat similar with Alvarez landing 202 punches and Golovkin landing 234. In the jab department, although Golovkin landed twices as many jabs as Alvarez (118 to 59), both fighters landed jabs at almost identical rates (Alvarez connected on 23 percent of his jabs while Golovkin landed 22 percent of his punches).
As far as power punches are concerned, Alvarez only had a slight edge in shots thrown and landed and was only barely more accurate. Alvarez landed 143 of 366 (39 percent) and Golovkin landed 116 of 332 (35 percent).
Going deeper into the round-by-round stats, one can see that there were several rounds that could have been scored either way. In six of the 12 rounds, the number of power punches thrown from each fighter either were exactly the same, or were within three punches of each other.
Even with all that in consideration, the fight ended with Alvarez’s hand being raised in victory, but only with a majority decision. Two of the three judges had scored the fight in favor of Alvarez and even so, it took Alvarez’s 12th round rally to swing the fight in favor of the Mexican on those two scorecards.
You can check out more news and reactions to the fight, as well as the entire pay-per-view card, at this link.
